How AI almost killed my newsletter 🤖🏳️

Welcome back to the uhh… 30-something-ith edition of The Lab Report!

This newsletter is going to be a little different than usual. A little less WordPress, and a little more “where TF have you been the last 3 months.” Back to regularly scheduled programming next week… I promise!

Ok, let’s get into it…

After staying pretty consistent with the newsletter for the previous 14 months, I finally broke.

3 months just went by without me writing a single one.

Up until the New Year, I was on a good groove with publishing content.

My goal was always to get one major output done per week, and 1-4 newsletters a month depending on how juicy the news was.

But the New Year also marked one other major milestone: ChatGPT and other AI tools were starting to run wild.

(Funny enough, my last newsletter was on the potential of using AI to build websites).

Suddenly, I was starting to feel paralyzed.

(And no, I’m not talking about the Christmas turkey…)

At first, my thoughts revolved around opportunity.

Holy shit, I can create blog posts how fast now? Holy shit, I can create graphic templates in the click of a button? Holy shit, I can create a code snippet to solve a problem hundreds of other people are having?

And then I started questioning everything.

What’s the point of writing blog posts now? What’s the point of creating templates?

If AI enables anyone to do it, then what’s the point?

I don’t want to be building sandcastles on a beach that’s just about to get pummelled by waves.

I probably spent a good couple months feeling like this.

Truth is, I don’t think those thoughts are unwarranted. And it seems like others are unsettled in their thoughts as well:

Things are changing FAST.

I don’t think we can even truly comprehend how fast they’re changing right now.

So what can we do about it?

I’ve decided to change my outlook.

Instead of trying to protect my sand castles, I want to learn how to ride the waves.

That doesn’t mean ditching what I know and jumping into a new AI startup or anything like that.

It just means riding with the flow 🏄‍♂️ – and learning to embrace it.

Acknowledging that opportunities can come and go in an instant, and being okay with that.

There was another tweet I saw that helped materialize my thoughts:

It took me a while to understand. What do you mean “forget your fkn dreams”??

Here’s my interpretation:

As humans and as business-builders, we have a [healthy] tendency to look to the future and imagine where our business will be 10 years from now.

But when things are changing literally every single day now, it’s hard to feel confidence in any plan.

That’s where we get stuck.

Instead, it’s more productive to focus on what’s in front of us, right now.

And then next month, do it all over again.

Whatever ‘it’ may be.

Ride the waves instead of building sand castles.

Ride the waves instead of drowning waiting for that next big one.